Want to know what pisses spiders off? When they come to a website and see the same danged title and description for every page in it. Not every page on your site is identical (if it is, you’re really in trouble because having duplicate content on your own site will make it drop like a stone in the rankings), and each page should have its own unique set of information.
The same goes for blogs. If you’re not adding a unique title and description to every post you make, you’re making a big mistake.
You need to get either All-in-One SEO Pack or HeadSpace 2, either of which allow you to add unique information to every post you make.
HeadSpace 2 makes it really easy. All you have to do is click “Page Title” under the post blank, and your post title will be carried down automatically. It doesn’t work very well with descriptions, so you’ll have to fill in the blank there, but it gives you a good chance to use some keywords for your page, as well.
Remember, the title and description of your page are what show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages), too. So, if you want people to see crappy information about your post, be sure to leave that information out. continue reading »
Oh, you’ve seen the sites. “Just $49 and we’ll submit your site to a gazillion search engines! It’s great for SEO! It’s amazing! Give us your money!”
PFFFTTT!!!
This is just one of those bullshit services that newbies fall for.
Here’s the deal… DO NOT pay anyone for search engine listings. The robots will find you, even if you have no keywords in your title, even if you have a crappy description, even if you’ve only been online for a week. Robots will find your page and decide whether to rank it or whether to come back at all.
Want to see if the search bots have seen your page and when?
Just type your domain into the search engine and see what comes up. At Google, if you click in the “Cached” link under the description for your site, you can see your page and the date and time that Google last visited. If it was the current day or yesterday, cool! You’re updating often. If it was a month ago, you have problems, brothers and sisters. You need to add some fresh stuff to your site or you’ll never rank in the SERPs (search engine results pages) at all.
Bing also has a “Cached Page” link that you can check out, but they’re still slower than Google. Google had my page from yesterday, while Bing hadn’t been there since 11/5. You know how often I post, so…
Yahoo also has a “Cached” link, but it wasn’t working, so… I can’t comment on its frequency by using this technique.
But there is a foolproof way: You can also go into your hosting account’s c-Panel dashboard to check this out. Most have a feature called “AWStats,” which tells you quite a lot of information, including which search bots visited and how many times they came during the month and even how many times they successfully accessed your “robots.txt” file. continue reading »
You’d think that “perfect” things would be valued, right? But news flash! None of us is perfect, no matter how hard we try. Really.
And spiders know that about us wily humans. They have a filter in their algorithm that says… “Hey wait! This is too perfect and humans are nowhere near as smart as us, so Ehhh!!! This page is being manipulated to make us think humans can be perfect. As if that would ever happen.”
What classifies as over-optimization?
One thing that’s a dead giveaway is keyword stuffing. If your keyword density is unusually high, that’s just a red flag. Don’t let it get over about 2%, three at the very highest.
Something else that will get your site dropping like a stone in the results is duplicate content. If you put an article on the front of your site, and the same thing hidden somewhere inside and you see that your site took a nosedive in the SERPs (search engine results pages)… that’s the problem! Spiders sniff that stuff out like bad Limburger cheese — easily.
And never use hidden text to get every one of your 500 keywords into the page. Dumb move! Spiders can’t see color. They see your text that isn’t hidden to them and they’ll know that you just added a list of keywords that have no value. Duh.
Here’s the thing… continue reading »
